Dante curates avant-garde exhibitions by day at a SoHo gallery known for its boundary-pushing installations—rooms that breathe, walls that hum with forgotten confessions—but by night he becomes the anonymous voice behind 'The Velvet Line,' a cult-followed advice column tucked into the back pages of an underground literary zine. No one knows it’s him; not the artists who trust him with their most fragile work, not the lovers whose letters he answers in the hush between midnight and dawn. He writes under a pseudonym because vulnerability feels safer when disguised as wisdom given rather than received.His true sanctuary is a speakeasy behind a crumbling vinyl shop in Greenwich Village, accessible only by sliding a Nina Simone record three-quarters of the way out. There, he mixes cocktails that taste like unspoken truths—smoked rosemary for regret, lavender bitters for longing, champagne cut with espresso to mimic the thrill of a first kiss on the L train. He believes emotions are better served stirred than spoken, at least at first. His love language is playlist curation between 2 AM cab rides, each mix named after a city mood: *Rain on Houston*, *Subway Echoes After You Left*.He keeps polaroids of every night that felt like possibility—steam rising off manholes with two silhouettes leaning close, a lipstick stain on a coffee cup left behind, hands nearly touching over a shared menu. These he stores in a tin beneath his bed labeled simply 'Almost.' He’s been learning how to want without hiding; the city helps—it forces closeness on trains, confessions during blackouts, intimacy when elevators stall between floors.Sexuality for Dante isn’t spectacle—it’s the brush of a coat sleeve against a lover’s arm during a rooftop storm, the way breath hitches when someone says your name like they’ve been practicing it in the dark. He moves slowly because he knows desire can feel dangerous when you've spent years pretending not to need anyone. But once trust is earned? He’ll book the last train to Coney Island just to kiss someone through dawn, salt air and static crackling around them as Brooklyn blurs past.